Users didn’t seek out past postings that they might have missed; they were content to read only the newest information.

So, once your message drops off a user’s main page, it might as well not exist. Users who continue browsing messages on the second page are almost unheard of.

This contrasts with email newsletters and other email notifications that users have to manually delete. Social network updates float down the timeline and eventually dissipate on their own, requiring nothing of users. Although our participants appreciated this fact, it does make stream-based media less powerful than email newsletters in terms of maintaining a customer relationship.

In some cases, companies had established a presence that they didn’t bother to update. These graveyard sites gave users a very negative impression when they were looking into companies’ social features.

The messages that received the highest scores had three things in common: they contained something of substance, were timely, and provided the kind of information that users expected from the source company or organization.